Ravikirti’s Aihole inscription glorifies Pulakeshin II

The inscription — nineteen lines of Sanskrit verse in the Chalukya script on the east wall of the Meguti temple, of which most of line 18 and the short line 19 are a later addition — opens with praise of the Jina and of the Chalukya family. Its 37 verses trace the dynasty from Jayasimha and Ranaraga to Pulakeshin I, who ‘became the bridegroom of Vatapi’ and performed the horse sacrifice, recount the victories of Kirtivarman I and Mangalesha and tell, in veiled words, how Pulakeshin II went into exile and brought about the fall of his uncle Mangalesha, who lost at once his kingdom, his life and his hope of leaving the throne to his son. Then come Pulakeshin’s wars: the siege of the Kadamba capital Banavasi, the Gangas and Alupas, the Mauryas of the Konkan and their city of Puri, besieged with hundreds of ships, the Latas, Malavas and Gurjaras, the defeat of Harsha, Kalinga and Kosala, Pishtapura, the lake of Kunala, the Pallava king driven behind the walls of Kanchipura and the campaign against the Cholas across the Kaveri. The poem gives its date twice — 3,735 years after the Bharata war and 556 years of the Shaka kings — and ends by naming Ravikirti as the builder of the temple and the author of the eulogy, who ‘by his poetic skill has attained to the fame of Kalidasa and of Bharavi’.

J. F. Fleet published the inscription in 1876 and 1879; Franz Kielhorn, who re-edited it in 1901, found the boast of equalling Kalidasa an exaggeration but placed Ravikirti ‘in the very front rank of court-poets’ and traced his borrowings from Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsha and Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniya. Historians also read the poem with caution: as Richard Salomon notes, a court poet could be expected to gloss over his patron’s defeats, and some of its claims — for example, that the Malavas and Gurjaras were his feudatories — are doubted in the light of other evidence. It is also one of the earliest texts to name Maharashtra, as ‘the three Maharashtrakas with their 99,000 villages’.